It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia’s first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program’s place among the best animation software.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender’s realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
One of the things you learn in art school is that if you aim for something like realism (or Pixar, in this case), but you fail to get there, people will notice and critique you for it. If you aim for a style you can do well, on the other hand, nobody will care that you didn’t do Realism (or Pixar).
Up and coming artists in any genre would do well to remember that it’s okay not to be Pixar or Capcom or whatever. Sometimes working within your limitations can inspire truly creative works.
Exactly. When I play indie games, I go for simpler art style because it feels so much more cohesive.
That really bugs me in newer Pokémon games, the Pokémon don’t seem to fit well into the world. I’d much rather have old school Pokémon than inconsistent art direction.
I love gen 1 sprite work.
I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.
Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.
For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.
Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.
A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.
I always think about Metal Gear Solid when considering true top-tier 3D art. Actually, first-party Sony games in general tend to have the best 3D art out there.
Pixar animation is computationally intensive, but artistically it has way more in common with the 3D videos for babies that show up in youtube feeds if you’re not logged in.
Sure. I wasn’t implying they were realistic, I was just drawing an analogy between Realism, the classical art style, and modern animation styles (like Pixar’s). Whatever style or genre you aim for, do it well.
Don Hertzfeldt made some amazing short films with a really, really simple art style.
The message sometimes matters more than the quality of the art. There is still a level of high quality to it despite the seemingly simple art style.